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Why I’m Digging Deep into Alzheimer’s
In every part of the world, people are living longer than they used to. Thanks to scientific advancements, fewer people die young from heart disease, cancer, and infectious diseases. It’s no longer unusual for a person to live well into their 80s and beyond. My dad will celebrate his 92nd birthday in a couple weeks, a milestone that was practically unimaginable when he was born.
This fact—that people are living longer than ever before—should always be a wonderful thing. But what happens when it’s not?
The longer you live, the more likely you are to develop a chronic condition. Your risk of getting arthritis, Parkinson’s, or another non-infectious disease that diminishes your quality of life increases with each year. But of all the disorders that plague us late in life, one stands out as a particularly big threat to society: Alzheimer’s disease.
You have a nearly 50 percent chance of developing the disease if you live into your mid-80s. In the United States, it is the only cause of death in the top 10 without any meaningful treatments that becomes more prevalent each year. That trend will likely continue as baby boomers age, which means that more families will watch their loved ones suffer from cognitive decline and slowly disappear. Despite this growing burden, scientists have yet to figure out what exactly causes Alzheimer’s or how to stop the disease from destroying the brain.
I first became interested in Alzheimer’s because of its costs—both emotional and economic—to families and healthcare systems. The financial burden of the disease is much easier to quantify. A person with Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia spends five times more every year out-of-pocket on healthcare than a senior without a neurodegenerative condition. Unlike those with many chronic diseases, people with Alzheimer’s incur long-term care costs as well as direct medical expenses. If you get the disease in your 60s or 70s, you might require expensive care for decades.
These costs represent one of the fastest growing burdens on healthcare systems in developed countries. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, Americans will spend $259 billion caring for those with Alzheimer’s and other dementias in 2017. Absent a major breakthrough, expenditures will continue to squeeze healthcare budgets in the years and decades to come. This is something that governments all over the world need to be thinking about, including in low- and middle-income countries where life expectancies are catching up to the global average and the number of people with dementia is on the rise.
The human cost of Alzheimer’s is much more difficult to put into numbers. It’s a terrible disease that devastates both those who have it and their loved ones. This is something I know a lot about, because men in my family have suffered from Alzheimer’s. I know how awful it is to watch people you love struggle as the disease robs them of their mental capacity, and there is nothing you can do about it. It feels a lot like you’re experiencing a gradual death of the person that you knew.
My family history isn’t the sole reason behind my interest in Alzheimer’s. But my personal experience has exposed me to how hopeless it feels when you or a loved one gets the disease. We’ve seen scientific innovation turn once-guaranteed killers like HIV into chronic illnesses that can be held in check with medication. I believe we can do the same (or better) with Alzheimer’s.
I’ve spent considerable time over the last year learning about the disease and the progress made to date. There’s a lot of amazing work being done in this field to delay Alzheimer’s and reduce its cognitive impact. What I’ve heard from researchers, academics, funders, and industry experts makes me hopeful that we can substantially alter the course of Alzheimer’s if we make progress in five areas:
- We need to better understand how Alzheimer’s unfolds. The brain is a complicated organ. Because it’s so difficult to study while patients are alive, we know very little about how it ages normally and how Alzheimer’s disrupts that process. Our understanding of what happens in the brain is based largely on autopsies, which show only the late stages of the disease and don’t explain many of its lingering mysteries. For example, we don’t fully understand why you are more likely to get Alzheimer’s if you’re African American or Latino than if you’re white. If we’re going to make progress, we need a better grasp on its underlying causes and biology.
- We need to detect and diagnose Alzheimer’s earlier. Since the only way to diagnose Alzheimer’s definitively is through an autopsy after death, it’s difficult to identify the disease definitively early in its progression. Cognitive tests exist but often have a high variance. If you didn’t sleep well the night before, that might skew your results. A more reliable, affordable, and accessible diagnostic—such as a blood test—would make it easier to see how Alzheimer’s progresses and track how effective new drugs are.
- We need more approaches to stopping the disease. There are many ways an Alzheimer’s drug might help prevent or slow down the disease. Most drug trials to date have targeted amyloid and tau, two proteins that cause plaques and tangles in the brain. I hope those approaches succeed, but we need to back scientists with different, less mainstream ideas in case they don’t. A more diverse drug pipeline increases our odds of discovering a breakthrough.
- We need to make it easier to get people enrolled in clinical trials. The pace of innovation is partly determined by how quickly we can do clinical trials. Since we don’t yet have a good understanding of the disease or a reliable diagnostic, it’s difficult to find qualified people early enough in the disease’s progression willing to participate. It can sometimes take years to enroll enough patients. If we could develop a process to pre-qualify participants and create efficient registries, we could start new trials more quickly.
- We need to use data better. Every time a pharmaceutical company or a research lab does a study, they gather lots of information. We should compile this data in a common form, so that we get a better sense of how the disease progresses, how that progression is determined by gender and age, and how genetics determines your likelihood of getting Alzheimer’s. This would make it easier for researchers to look for patterns and identify new pathways for treatment.
By improving in each of these areas, I think we can develop an intervention that drastically reduces the impact of Alzheimer’s. There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about our chances: our understanding of the brain and the disease is advancing a great deal. We’re already making progress—but we need to do more.
I want to support the brilliant minds doing this work. As a first step, I’ve invested $50 million in the Dementia Discovery Fund—a private fund working to diversify the clinical pipeline and identify new targets for treatment. Most of the major pharmaceutical companies continue to pursue the amyloid and tau pathways. DDF complements their work by supporting startups as they explore less mainstream approaches to treating dementia.
I’m making this investment on my own, not through the foundation. The first Alzheimer’s treatments might not come to fruition for another decade or more, and they will be very expensive at first. Once that day comes, our foundation might look at how we can expand access in poor countries.
But before we can even begin to think about how we do that, we need lots of scientific breakthroughs. With all of the new tools and theories in development, I believe we are at a turning point in Alzheimer’s R&D. Now is the right time to accelerate that progress before the major costs hit countries that can’t afford high priced therapies and where exposure to the kind of budget implications of an Alzheimer’s epidemic could bankrupt health systems.
This is a frontier where we can dramatically improve human life. It’s a miracle that people are living so much longer, but longer life expectancies alone are not enough. People should be able to enjoy their later years—and we need a breakthrough in Alzheimer’s to fulfill that. I’m excited to join the fight and can’t wait to see what happens next.
This blog is a cross-post with Gates Notes
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About the author
Bill Gates
Bill Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In 1975, Bill Gates founded Microsoft with Paul Allen, and led the company to become the worldwide leader in business and personal software and services. In 2008, Bill transitioned to focus full-time on his foundation’s work to expand opportunity to the world’s most disadvantaged people. Along with co-chair Melinda Gates, he leads the foundation’s development of strategies and sets the overall direction of the organisation. In 2010, Bill, Melinda, and Warren Buffett founded the Giving Pledge, an effort to encourage the wealthiest families and individuals to publicly commit more than half of their wealth to philanthropic causes and charitable organisations during their lifetime or in their will.
Tags: Fundraising
Thanks Bill Gates! This is awesome news!
Bill Gates needs to delaying his search for fix for this disease.
GOOGLE Jack William Schultz
What an amazing thing to do , my mother suffers with this awful disease as well as Parkinson’s , it’s hard.
Heartening to hear .
Thank you Bill Gates! My wonderful husband has just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and right now the hardest part of coming to terms with that for both of us is to be told it is progressive and there is no cure. We have seen the terrible effects of the disease and it is frightening to face it ourselves. It is so good to know that you are fighting to bring hope – and I believe that you will succeed.
Saw this on my twitter feed and had to make a comment, this is absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for doing this Bill!
Saw this on my twitter feed and had to make a comment, this is absolutely incredible. Thank you so much for doing this Bill!
Great news
Whole genome…..Exome sequencing as BIG DATA……is the future to study these diseases
Wonderful News!
What an amazing thing to do. Thank you.
Bill – as a young father in my 30s’, you give me hope and excitement to age well, watching my daughters grow into women, with sound body and mind. I having growing confidence that brilliant, caring people like you are working to make the world a better place.
You, quite simply, are the man.
Bill, thank you for your generous gift to fight this terrible disease. Both my parents died from this disease, and my fear is that I will get it also. The loss of loosing both my parents is devastating and a cure has to be found !!.
Fantastic news Bill. I have seen the devastation this illness has, not only on the sufferer but on their nearest and dearest. Frustration, disappointment, heartache—just a few of the many feelings I have seen. The love shines through from husbands, wives and children as they endeavour to manage this dreadful disease.
I’m so pleased you continue to realise how fortunate you have been in being able to make such a generous and caring investment. You could well change for the better many millions of lives—now that would be a legacy to leave one day.
A great decision; for similar reason I’m determined to spend at least part of my remaining active life involved in this challenge. I don’t have your money but I do have knowledge and skills; I hope the fund encourages a lot of people like me to give their time and effort.
Thanks Bill Gates. My husband has Alzheimer’s and my mother died from it in 2013.
It was nice to read this. I’m waiting on the outcome of an early career fellowship application looking at whether we can use simple vision tests routinely performed in optometry practices and hospitals to track the course of dementia over time, as poor vision is associated with cognitive decline. It’s not a drug trial but nobody’s really done this particular research before because the focus is so much on looking for a cure.
It’s nice to see a bit of a shift to recognise that we’re still many years away from a pharmaceutical breakthrough and more needs to be done right now to improve quality of life for people living with dementia. I hope the funders like my proposal and want to fund it as sight problems are a really prevalent comorbidity for people with dementia and I’m hoping the results will make more of a case for early treatment of remediable visual problems such as cataracts and binocular vision disorders 🙂
There’s already some great internet of things research being conducted with people with dementia and their caregivers so I really hope you joining the fight will encourage more computer scientists to join up with clinicians and take the plunge in this area.
Thank you Bill Gates!
I would love the DDF to research the prevention of building up the abnormal proteins in the brain that lead to Dementia.
My mother recently died from her 7 year illness from Dementia.
I follow recent advice of healthy diet, gentle exercise, socialising and good sleep. I write about on my website http://www.cazza.com inspiring happiness.
I’m raising money for Alzheimers Research UK this Christmas, one can only dream of making $50,000,000 for the great work of talented doctors and scientists.
Thank you again,
Cazza
Bill thankyou very much for what you’re doing ,my husband has just been diagnosed with dementia . I have worked with dementia and know what is going to happen.You might not be able to help my husband but hopefully some day there will be a cure for our young people of the future.
That’s brilliant Bill. I run a project in Oxfordshire, England, That provides dedicated volunteers who give two or three hours each week to sit with a person with Dementia, while the husband, wife, daughter or son caring, has a break from their 24 hour caring role. Caring for someone with dementia can be a very isolating experience. I lost my government funding but am determined to keep this service going. It is free to Carers, thus not adding to their already increased financial burden. These breaks may help a carer from reaching crisis point. My own mother had dementia. I hope a cure will be found one day.
Thank you for posting this comment.
Wonderful news.Thank you so much .
We think we have an approach that will make history, regarding this issue.
Thanks
Very encouraging a high profile (and wealthy) individual gets involved in tackling this cruel disease. I would like to see more research effort focused on lifestyle, diet and environmental factors.
This is indeed wonderful news -and gives hope for the future-sadly too late for my Dad who died from this awful disease in December 2015 however despite this I remain optimistic that there will be a cure within my lifetime -or at least in that of my children. I lost my Dad twice firstly when he got Dementia and then when he died -it was the most painful my family and I had to endure to watch him progressively diminish and there was nothing we could to stop it
Thank you so much , for your wonderful work. My mother leave in South East Asia. Started to develop Dementia 3 years ago . She have got memory problem and can not look after her , which made me suffer.
this is such a nice blog and thanks for your support for people living with dementia.